With NFL Super Bowl 58, NCAA March Madness basketball, the NBA and NHL Playoffs, the climax to the Premier League season, the beginning of the F1 season, and the Olympic Games on the horizon, sports fans are going to be hard pressed to leave the house.
The US live TV streaming service YouTube TV is planning on making that to make those months of live sports viewing even more enjoyable with a pair of new features.
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First, the company is building upon a feature that lessens the latency between the truly live happening and it appearing on your television set. The service recently added the ability to prioritise getting the pictures to you faster with a “reduce broadcast delay” as an option within the three-dot playback menu.
Those delays are inherent when streaming sports rather than watching on live TV, mainly because the way the video needs to be encoded to be delivered over the web. Personally, I’ve lost count of how many games I’ve had spoiled for me by being behind people who love to send texts as goals go in.
However, the latest update to the feature allows viewers to keep the ability to reduce the broadcast delay on indefinitely. Previously it was only possible to turn it on for 48 hours at a time (via ChromeUnboxed).
YouTube does warn this may mean choppier playback performance, so any gains you see from pushing the picture to you sooner may be wiped out. However, in my brief tests of the feature it works pretty well.
Elsewhere, YouTube TV is working on a ‘Build a Multiview’ option that will place up to four live games of your choice on the screen at one time in a mosaic.
Currently, YouTube offers this feature for college basketball games and certain NBA games in the United States but it curates the games for you. Now the company has confirmed to CoreCuttersNews that it will now let users pick which match-ups they see from a selection of available events.
Hopefully this stretches out to all channels showing live sports. That way viewers can truly build out their own sports bar experience and watch whatever live event they like.
